The Circuit

By Judi Hasson

Jul 10, 2000

The Cold War is Over  or Is It?

Scientists at the Energy Department's laboratories don't like polygraphs
one bit, according to a new report from the House Intelligence Committee.
Investigators said employees at one laboratory wear buttons that say, "Just
say no to the polygraph." Other lab employees expressed the view, "You trusted
me to win the Cold War, now you don't."

Can't a Program Get a Hearing in this Town?

For the second year, the House Government Reform Committee cancelled
a hearing for an update on FTS 2001, the General Services Administration's
multi-million-dollar telecommunications contract. The June 22 hearing would
have been the first committee review of the program since 1998.

A committee spokeswoman said the hearing was slated for the same time
as a subcommittee's review of the Cyber Security Information Act, and members
of the reform committee wanted to attend that hearing. But a source familiar
with the committee's hearing agenda said GSA and vendors wanted the hearing
scrubbed when it became clear that not all the testimony would be positive.
"It was "hearing theater,'" the source remarked. "[GSA] had a script, and
the vendors had a script." But the curtain never went up because at least
one witness intended to ad lib.

A Diet for Everyone

The Agriculture Department recently reported that the nation's schoolchildren
are flunking at healthy eating. If you think your child is in that group,
there's some help for you. An interactive site from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention provides a digital report card for both you and your
child, helping to calculate body mass and fat. The body-mass-index Web calculator
provides the information in both American and metric measurements so there
are no excuses for mistakes about portion size. Move over, Weight Watchers.

New Words for the Millennium

Unless you've been living on a desert island for the past decade, you
certainly should know what "24-7," "dot-com" and "zettabyte" mean in the
world of information technology. Now, those words, among others that have
their roots in the technology revolution, have made it into the latest edition
of Webster's New World College Dictionary.
IT Moves and Shakes in More Ways Than One

More than 1,700 senior IT executives attended the IT World Congress
in Taipei, Taiwan, last month. Keynote speakers included Microsoft Corp.
CEO Bill Gates, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers, Virginia Gov. James
Gilmore and dozens more. The local press hailed the gathering as a must
for IT movers and shakers.

As it turned out, the attendees got to experience another kind of shaking  an aftershock from Taiwan's latest earthquake, which registered 6.7 on
the Richter scale. Among those who felt the earth move under their feet
were Don Upson, Virginia's technology secretary; Tom Hewitt, president of
Global Government; and Harris Miller, ITAA president. We hear they were
happy to get back to Washington, where the earth shakes only during an election
year.

A two-year campaign that prompted the Department of Homeland Security to issue its first-ever emergency directive to agencies to shore up cyber defenses appears in part to have been an attempt to spy on U.S. government internet traffic.